Consciousness is an illusion

I saw this interesting pop science article about new advances in neuro-technology for paralyzed people that included some serendipitous discovery about measurements of unconscious thoughts.  I went down a rabbit hole looking up qualia, sentience, and consciousness.  So I chatted with some of the AI chatter-bots about my understanding and weakly-held, strong belief that consciousness is an illusion.

Here is a (long) response from one of them that concludes consciousness is real and exists, but it is different from how we currently understand what it means.  I still feel that if consciousness does exist, it is radically different from our misperception of what it really is.

Here is a different response (shorter) that agrees with me and includes better rebuttals against the counter-factuals and strong negative references I found to my hypothesis.